Social media played a significant role in many of the major news events in 2011. This week, The Globe’s #yearinhashtags project examines the impact social media had on five of the year's biggest stories: Arab Spring, Charlie Sheen, B.C. riot, Occupy Wall Street and the "It gets better" campaign.
The genesis of Occupy Wall Street can be traced back to a group of Canadian activists and a picture of a ballerina poised atop a charging bull.
Fuelled by millions of mostly young protesters around the world, the Occupy Wall Street movement has not only redefined the terms of the debate around income inequality, but also revolutionized the very act of protest. Despite almost no hierarchy, the largely unco-ordinated protesters around the world have managed to speak in a much more unified voice, thanks in large part to social-media outlets – especially Twitter.
This summer, the staff of the Canadian activist organization Adbusters gathered to brainstorm an idea. For more than 20 years, the group has railed against rampant consumerism and corporate influence. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the group sought to take the idea of regime change to America, focusing on the financial industry’s impact and influence on democracy.
In designing a poster to support the notion, Adbusters’s art department conceived an image of a ballerina, balanced on one pointed foot in mid-turn, standing atop Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull” sculpture. The juxtaposition was stark – an image both serene and aggressive. For the campaign, Adbusters chose a simple Twitter hashtag: #OccupyWallStreet.
“As soon as we put out that hashtag, man, it just went crazy,” says Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters.
Soon, thousands of protesters caught on to the message, which coalesced around a planned occupation in New York on Sept. 17th. As the date grew near, the number of references to the movement began to skyrocket. Finally, just a day before the planned protest, a few influential New York-based Twitter accounts mentioned the movement, giving it a last-minute jolt.
As the Occupy movement began to focus on New York’s Zuccotti Park in September and October, protesters in hundreds of other cities began to follow suit. As a result, the number of Occupy-related hashtags also exploded. There was tags related to specific cities (Oakland, Toronto, Sydney), dates (N17, which references a day of action held on Nov. 17), and even parody tags (#Occupy Sesame Street, which bemoaned the fact that 99 per cent of the cookies are eaten by 1 per cent of the monsters). According to estimates from Twitter, more than 100,000 different tags were used in tweets about the Occupy movement.
That massive variety, however, and the steady growth of the movement, served as a sort of hindrance in the social-media sphere. Both factors meant that the movement rarely showed up in Twitter’s influential list of “Trending Topics,” which measures popular social-media conversations. (Twitter tends to focus on spikes, such as that generated by news of Osama bin Laden’s death, rather than longer-term topics.)
Eventually, the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag proved too unwieldy. Not only did it eat up valuable characters from Twitter’s 140-character limit, but it also took too long to type, especially in the heat of a protest.
“It’s inevitable that #OccupyWallStreet would be too long,” says Andrew Katz, a Masters student at Columbia University who has followed the Occupy movement closely for months. “Shorter tweets work better because they’re easier to retweet.”
Even as thousands of users continued to use various hashtags, the wider movement settled on one: #ows. It was short, unique and to the point.
